How expensive is quality journalism?

Good information about how much quality journalism really costs is strangely difficult to come by. So thanks to Zachary Seward for sharing a few examples with us, prompted by the ProPublica/New York Times 13,000 word Katrina magazine story:

In this case, Fink was paid $33,000 plus $10,000 in expenses for her Kaiser fellowship, according to Steve Engelberg, her editor at ProPublica, where she’s been for 14 months. Engelberg, who was kind enough to go through these figures with me, said, “Fourteen months of salary plus benefits for us easily gets you north of 100 plus, 100, 150 or something.” He threw in another $20,000 to $30,000 for travel expenses, in addition to three months of editing and lawyering at ProPublica and the Times, which also spent $25,000 to $30,000 on photographs, he said.

UPDATE: A more detailed breakdown in Mother Jones. 10.000 for fact-checking? Wow.

Probably most news organizations prefer to keep such numbers for themselves, or maybe they don’t even break them down in much detail. A good thing about a crisis in journalism: It would probably expose the real costs.

And now I have to read the Katrina story — and wonder if any Norwegian newspaper will foot the translation bill and re-publish it, which they can after Sept. 29.